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What Charles G. Koch Can Teach Us About Campaign Finance Data
Lasrick writes "Lee Drutman is a political scientist with the Sunlight Foundation who does terrific work. In this article, he attempts to trace campaign donations made by one of the Koch Brothers and discovers just how difficult it is to do: 'The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It's hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn't require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don't always reliably report donor names. Given this, it is unclear how the FEC would even enforce its own aggregate limit rules. The FEC's spokesperson told me that while the FEC welcomes complaints, it does not typically take enforcement initiative."'
Despite the fact that the record shows them preventing crimes and arresting criminals.
Tell that to Boston. You know, where the FBI was flat-out told by Russia "this man is a radical Muslim and is going to commit terrorist attacks" and the FBI responded by asking him if it were true and then ignoring him. (But apparently my phone calls are needed to "stop the terrorists!")
Actually, maybe don't tell Boston that, because apparently the city was trying to get the attack classified as "not a terrorist attack" in order to not offend Muslims or something.
But the point stands: if the FBI can't catch a terrorist when they're flat-out told "he's a terrorist" by Russia, why the hell should we believe that they'd do any better when it's the NSA telling them? We already know the FBI can't stop even the most inept and incompetent terrorist attacks like the one in Boston, why would they do any better with the aid of nation-wide spying? That was, you know, was ALREADY HAPPENING WHEN THEY MISSED THAT ATTACK IN ANY CASE. So it's not like this is theoretical or anything: PRISM didn't help stop the Boston attack. Which isn't surprising since being handed a report saying "this man is a terrorist" didn't help prevent them.
Another irrational statement. Obama is not micromanaging the IRS. There is indication Obama did any such thing.
Wrong: the IRS manager had nearly 200 meetings at the White House. There's very good evidence Obama knew exactly what was happening and didn't care.
Unfortunately your chance at the moral high-ground was killed when conservatives profiled black-people as being more likely to have invalid voter-registration, and thus did mass suppression of voting in black areas.
Uh, also wrong: the simple answer is that we have no idea how bad voter fraud is in the United States because WE DON'T BOTHER CHECKING FOR IT. Voter ID laws are NOT targeting "blacks" they're targeting voter fraud PERIOD, plain and simple. No racial bias since it covers everyone, no economic bias since the IDs are free for people who can't afford them.
Barack Obama named and attacked big money Romney/Republican donors in his campaign speeches. Called them un-American, etc. A couple days later the IRS and other government agencies starts auditing them.
Mafia bosses don't micro manage all their thugs on the street either.
Deregulation has caused us nothing but trouble. Remember that Enron crisis a decade or so ago in CA?
I take it you don't realize that the state of California deliberately broke the electricity market in question? Electricity utilities were required to buy a portion of their electricity at any price on the spot market. It didn't take the so-called "smartest people in the room" (Enron) to see that was going to cause lucrative trouble.
And once this flaw was revealed in the summer of 2000, the then governor, Gray Davis let this flaw run on for about six to seven months, bankrupting one utility and almost nailing a second (there were three such businesses in addition to utilities on the public or non profit side).
Yes, Enron and other players manipulated the market. But we need to remember that the market was designed to reward such market manipulation.
Another group of markets with similar behavior are the carbon credit exchanges in Europe. Because of the hard cap on the credits allotted for emissions, there either are more credits than emissions or less. In the former case, emission credits are low value. In the latter case, the high inelasticity of supply drives up prices and encourages market manipulation.
After all, if you can buy a lot of credits early in the year for cheap and then sell them to desperate coal power generators and other industries near the end of the year, then you can make a bit of coin, even if you can't get rid of all the credits you bought.
Anyway, when that market melts down, you'll know why.
It's tiresome to see all these accusations against deregulation by the painfully ignorant. Deregulation can be done poorly, such as the California energy crisis or the firesale of Russian gas properties to Yeltsin cronies. Or it can be done well. One doesn't see such drama in telecommunications or passenger air travel, for example.
Really strange - the lefts HATRED of brothers promoting freedom with their own money.
For the record - did you know that the Koch Brothers support:
Decriminalizing drugs,
Legalizing gay marriage,
Repealing the Patriot Act,
Ending the police state,
Cutting defense spending.
They call this being way right wing?
Where in the Constitution is there a right to privacy for individuals?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Seriously, did you even read the article? (I know, I know, this is /., what on earth am I thinking.) That's a rhetorical question, of course - you wouldn't ask the question you asked if you'd read the article. Then again, that seems to also be true of quite a few people who replied to you, so you're hardly alone.
Koch is the subject because an earlier article, by the same author, had listed Koch as one of nearly 600 people who appeared to have exceeded campaign contribution limits. Turns out this was incorrect - an error due in large part to the disasterously poor state of data on contributions by major donors. The whole damned article is both exonerating Koch and explaining where the original analyis went wrong. It's about Koch because Koch's company took the time to contact the author, work with him to identify where and how some of the erroneous data came about, and help set the record straight. If one of the other nearly 600 donors listed had done the same, this follow-up article might easily have been about someone other than Koch.
It's got nothing to do with "evil", "good", "bad", etc, except inasmuch as the FEC data is manifestly "bad", and woefully inadequate for even the FEC themselves to determine who may be breaking campaign finance laws. If you want to get upset about the article, get upset about the real point - that nobody has sufficient information to tell whether major contributors on either side of the political aisle are breaking the law. (And there were plenty of Dem donors in the original article if you take the time to read it. I apologize in advance to you that Soros wasn't on the list. Well, that's not true - there's two Soroses (Sori?) on the lists - just that <Jedi>these are not the Soroses you're looking for</Jedi>)
So untwist your knickers, grab a beer, chill out, then try actually reading the article.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Whatever gives you that idea? Opposition to rent seeking is probably the primary defining characteristic of libertarianism, and the Koch brothers support numerous causes and organizations that strongly oppose rent seeking.
The 19th century robber barons weren't unfettered free marketeers, they were people who translated a high level of political influence and corruption into personal fortunes. This is exactly what libertarianism opposes.
Do have even the slightest idea what you're saying? Do you really think anybody who is rich is affected by income taxes at all? Rich people don't have income, they mostly just own untaxable assets. Income tax is primarily a burden on the middle class and professionals, not "the rich".
Furthermore, the 19th century was a period of great improvement in the standard of living for everybody, not a period of economic and social decline the way you falsely portray it.
I'm outta mod points anyway so I'll just clear up this lie right here. It was _not_ a 90% tax rate. It was a graduating rate where you paid the same tax on the first $50k as someone making only $50k, then you paid the same tax on the _next_ $50k as someone making $100k, and so on so forth. When you got to $1 mil/yr+ you paid 90% on the amount between $900k and $1 mil. I'm simplifying it so my numbers might be off, but that's the gist of it.
Basically at one point in time we said there ought to be limits on how much of societies limited resources we dedicate to 1 person.
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